In the first quarter of this year, however, something rather disruptive happened. In the company's latest report [PDF], released today, the iPhone has widened the gap again -- and it's largely due to the Verizon effect. "There's no doubt that Verizon's launch of the iPhone 4, combined with AT&T's response on the discounted 3GS devices, certainly gave iPhones a bit of a lift," says Good's SVP of Corporate Strategy, John Herrema.

"What we were seeing in the 4th quarter was that Android was trending upward and getting close to catching up," he says, "but in the first quarter of 2011 the iPhone has reasserted itself as the leading platform, at least with activations by our customers." The Verizon iPhone launch apparently resulted in the highest rate of activation (16.9 percent) for any new device since Good has been publicly tracking and publishing reports (Q3 2010).

The tablet story is dramatically more one-sided, with the iPad and iPad 2 generating almost all of the tablet activations Good saw in the quarter. iPads represented about 20% of all device activations seen on the system, with Android tablets creeping in and reaching the 1% mark for the first time. "We're seeing the tablet momentum continuing, really driven by iPad and iPad 2," said Herrema. "We're starting to see the first glimmers of Android tablets showing up on the scene. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out in the 2nd quarter, especially as Honeycomb [Android 3.0] shows up on more devices besides the Motorola Xoom."

Overall, iOS devices made up just under 70% of all device activations Good measured during the quarter. As before, Good's visibility into the enterprise is solid but not comprehensive; it cannot measure BlackBerry deployment volumes, nor does it support Windows 7 phones at this time. Nevertheless, as a proxy for deployments of the devices it does support, Good's numbers are (sorry) pretty good.